Colonial Latin American Review ISSN: 1060-9164 (Print) 1466-1802 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccla20 Seeking Indianness: Christoph Weiditz, the Aztecs, and feathered Amerindians Elizabeth Hill Boone To cite this article: Elizabeth Hill Boone (2017) Seeking Indianness: Christoph Weiditz, the Aztecs, and feathered Amerindians, Colonial Latin American Review, 26:1, 39-61, DOI: 10.1080/10609164.2017.1287323 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2017.1287323 Published online: 07 Apr 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 82 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccla20 Download by: [Library of Congress] Date: 21 August 2017, At: 10:40 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW, 2017 VOL. 26, NO. 1, 39–61 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2017.1287323 Seeking Indianness: Christoph Weiditz, the Aztecs, and feathered Amerindians Elizabeth Hill Boone Tulane University In sixteenth-century Europe, it mattered what one wore. For people living in Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Italy, clothing reflected and defined for others who one was socially and culturally. Merchants dressed differently than peasants; Italians dressed differently than the French.1 Clothing, or costume, was seen as a principal signifier of social identity; it marked different social orders within Europe, and it was a vehicle by which Europeans could understand the peoples of foreign cultures. Consequently, Eur- opeans became interested in how people from different regions and social ranks dressed, a fascination that gave rise in the mid-sixteenth century to a new publishing venture and book genre, the costume book (Figure 1). As the European world opened up to recognize newly encountered peoples from far-flung lands, the costume book became a medium by which Europeans came to see and thereby understand something of these foreigners. Not fashion manuals, costume books were proto ethnologies that brought information about other cultures and peoples into upper- and middle-class Euro- pean homes (Defert 1984; Jones 2006, 93). An early prototype of the costume book is the so-called Trachtenbuch (costume book) of Christoph Weiditz (Figures 2–7). Created c. 1529–1530, it pictures the dress, physical characteristics, and activities of people of varied social ranks and occupations from differ- ent regions of the Netherlands, Spain, and other parts of Europe, including some of the Aztecs who accompanied Hernando Cortés to Spain in 1528 and joined the court of Charles V.2 Weiditz’s paintings of the indigenous Americans, in particular, offered what has long been considered an eyewitness account, designed to reach Europeans eager to know more about the look and manners of peoples of the Americas. Although his paint- Downloaded by [Library of Congress] at 10:40 21 August 2017 ings remained unpublished until the twentieth century, they circulated and were copied, and some were replicated in published costume books. The thirteen paintings of Amerindians that Weiditz included are usually all said to rep- resent the Aztecs brought by Cortés to Spain. This essay argues, however, that although some figures do represent Aztecs from Central Mexico, most were accessorized more extravagantly, to produce exotics on display, with physical and sartorial features drawn from common stocks of prints, descriptions, and objects representing the Americas, which were circulating in Europe at the time. The dissonance between Weiditz’s painted images and the Aztecs who actually visited Charles’s court points up how difficult it was for Europeans then—and even for scholars until recently—to recognize real ethnic, cultural, and, indeed, social distinctions among the indigenous people of the Americas and how easy it was simply to blend them together as exotics. Weiditz’s ‘Aztec’ figures © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group on behalf of CLAR 40 E. H. BOONE Figure 1. Italian woman, François Deserps, Recueil del la diversité des habits,p.9. Downloaded by [Library of Congress] at 10:40 21 August 2017 particularly exemplify the visual entanglement of diverse objects from and images of the Americas whose trajectories brought them together in early sixteenth-century Europe. European costume studies European interest in the dress of foreigners flowered especially in the second half of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, but it was well under way at least by the late fifteenth century. A celebrated early example is the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini, who served as painter for the Ottoman emperor in Istanbul between 1479 and 1481, where he executed a series of costume studies (Campbell and Chong 2005,89–119; Ilg 2004, 35). These prefigure the costume studies of the sixteenth century by featuring a single individual sitting or standing in an otherwise empty space, the details of clothing and adornment rendered with precision. More widely disseminated and therefore more COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 41 Figure 2. Left, woman of Galicia going to the spinning room. Right, Castilian peasant going into a city to market. Christoph Weiditz, Trachtenbuch, pp. 18–19. Germanische Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Hs. 22474.4. Downloaded by [Library of Congress] at 10:40 21 August 2017 Figure 3. Indians brought by Cortés playing patolli, glossed ‘These are Indian people whom Ferdinand Cortez brought to His Imperial Majesty from India and they have played before His Imperial Majesty with wood and ball. With their fingers they gamble like Italians’ (Hampe 1994, 27). Christoph Weiditz, Trachtenbuch, pp. 12–13. Germanische Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Hs. 22474.4. 42 E. H. BOONE Figure 4. Left, Indian log juggler, glossed ‘Thus he throws the log above him with the feet.’ Right, Indian warrior, glossed ‘Thus they go in India with their arms two thousand miles away, where gold is found in the water.’ Christoph Weiditz, Trachtenbuch, pp. 6–7. Germanische Nationalmuseum, Nur- emberg, Hs. 22474.4. Downloaded by [Library of Congress] at 10:40 21 August 2017 Figure 5.. Indian men, respectively glossed ‘Thus the Indians go, have costly jewels let into their face, can take them out when they want to and can put then in again,’ and ‘This is also an Indian man.’ Chris- toph Weiditz, Trachtenbuch, pp. 2–3. Germanische Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Hs. 22474.4. COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 43 Figure 6. Indian woman, glossed ‘In this manner the Indian women go. Not more than one of them has come out’ (Hampe 1994, 28). Christoph Weiditz, Trachtenbuch, p. 1. Germanische Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Hs. 22474.4 influential was Bernhard von Breydenbach’s popular Perigrinatio in terram sanctam of 1486, which reported on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Considered to be the first printed travel account, and extensively illustrated with woodcuts by Erhard Reuwich, it included city views and prints representing the distinctive dress of Turks, Saracens, Downloaded by [Library of Congress] at 10:40 21 August 2017 Greeks, Ethiopians, Jews, and Syrians (Ross 2014,74–86). Voyages of discovery and exploration exposed Europe to even more distant peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, which broke the boundaries of what Europeans knew about the world. The Ottoman threat along Europe’s eastern border highlighted the need also to recognize and negotiate foreign cultures at its very doors. These phenomena opened the minds of Europeans to previously unimagined worlds and people of different customs and manners, which now had to be comprehended and regularized. Information about these foreign peoples had to be categorized and organized in a way that could make sense of all the incoming data and allow principal cultural features to stand out. In par- ticular, attention was paid to the visage and dress of peoples as signs of their cultural iden- tity, for clothes were seen as markers of social rank and behavioral habits, windows onto the customs and identity of people (Jones 2006, 93). In the 1510s artists like Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgkmair began to record the features and dress of people from 44 E. H. BOONE Figure 7. Indian men, respectively glossed ‘This is an Indian, a noble of their kind’ and ‘This is also the Indian manner, how they have brought wood jugs with them out of which they drink.’ Christoph Weiditz, Trachtenbuch, pp. 4–5. Germanische Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Hs. 22474.4 Africa and Brazil; Dürer had already been drawing Turks after a trip to Venice in 1494– 1495 (Levinson 1991, 212–13). Also in the 1510s the emperor Maximilian assembled images of people from vastly different parts of the world for his allegorical Triumph, a project of monumental woodcuts intended to be circulated among his royal allies and sub- jects.3 It is within this climate that Christoph Weiditz created his own compilation of the dress, occupation, and customs of folk from the Netherlands, Spain, and other regions of Europe (the Trachtenbuch). The growing interest in habits, and thus the costumes, of diverse people eventually gave birth in the late 1550s to a new publishing venture, the costume book.4 They were collec- Downloaded by [Library of Congress] at 10:40 21 August 2017 tions of usually full-page illustrations of people and their clothing, with identifying cap- tions and sometimes a short commentary. The first, François Deserps’s Recueil de la diversité des habits que sont de present en usage dans les pays d’Europe, Asia, Affrique et Islas sauvages le tout fait après le naturel, published in Paris in 1562, exemplifies the genre. It is a small, octavo-sized book of 121 woodcut plates that feature a single standing or striding figure above a label and four lines of descriptive verse (Figure 1). 5 Its coverage begins locally with the French Chevalier, followed by French people from different occu- pations and stations in life (e.g.